(crossposted to College English)
I haven’t seen it yet, and am not sure I want to. I’d rather like to go with my 280 students and sit in the back and be silly and throw things, but I think we’re all mired in writing papers and marking papers and just Getting Through the next few weeks. Maybe we’ll go – we’ll see.
Anyway, I thought you might be interested to read a few responses from the scholars of Old English and/or Medieval studies on my blogroll.
Dr Virago calls it similar to a student’s B- paper, which I think is a very good analogy. Something that has good intentions and some ideas but fails in the application.
Michael Drout, on Wormtalk and Slugspeak, has rather the opposite reaction: he thinks there are some marvellous visuals (naked Angelina Joli being one) but that the themes are tedious and cliche.
Richard Nokes is still waiting for the Great Beowulf Film. He seems to quite like the theme (of narrative unreliability) but didn’t seem to like much else except Angelina Jolie’s prehensile tail braid.
I just saw it this weekend, and I think it was a good movie for what it was, being just another action movie of our time. But I personally would have been much more impressed to have seen them do it exactly like the original lays out. Some of the characters (like Unferth) were exactly how I had pictured them, and it would have been really interesting to have seen the whole thing film that.